An Unkindness of Ravens

by Ruth Rendell

  Burden shrugged silently as the door closed behind them and subsided into one of his typical morose reveries. Wexford had a look round the room they were sitting in. The house was newer than the Williams home in Kingsmarkham, a small “townhouse” with an integral garage, built probably in the late 1960s. Wendy was a thorough, meticulous, and perhaps fanatical housekeeper. This was a through room with a dining area and it had very recently been redecorated in gleaming white with an undertone of palest pink. One of the colors in the Sevensmith Harding “Ice Cream” range? The carpet was deep strawberry pink, some of the furniture mahogany, some white canework, cushions in various shades of pink and red. It was tasteful, it was a far cry from the stereotyped shabbiness of Joy’s home, but somehow it was also uncomfortable, as if everything had been placed there—hanging baskets, little tables, red Venetian glass—for effect rather than for use.

  He remembered that a young girl also lived here. There were no signs of her. But what sign did he expect or would he recognize if he saw it? She had been twelve in the picture …

  “My daughter is sixteen now,” Wendy said when the coffee was brought. A slightly defiant note came into her voice as she added, “She was sixteen three weeks ago.”

  Her gaze fell. He did some calculations, remembering what she had said about her wedding anniversary taking place in March. So Williams had “married” her three months before the child was born. He had had to wait until she reached the legal age of marriage.

  “Where were you married, Mrs. Williams?”

  “Myringham Registry Office. My mother wanted us to have a church wedding but—well, for obvious reasons …”

  Wexford could imagine one very obvious reason if she had been six months pregnant. The nerve of Williams, a married man, “marrying” this child, as she had been, a mere dozen miles from his home town! The wedding to Joy, Dora had told him, had been at St. Peter’s, Kingsmarkham, the bride in white slipper satin …

  Wendy was thrusting a paper at him. He saw it was her marriage certificate.

  In the Registration District of Myringham, at the Register Office. Rodney John Williams, aged thirty-two. In some respects, at any rate, he had been honest. Though he could hardly have distorted those facts. They had been on his birth certificate. A Bath address, his brother’s probably, his occupation sales representative. Wendy Ann Rees, aged sixteen, Pelham Street, Myringham, shop assistant. The witnesses had been Norman Rees and Brenda Rees, parents presumably, or brother and sister-in-law.

  He handed it back to her. She looked at it herself and her tongue flicked out to moisten her lips. For a moment, from the way she was holding it, he thought she was going to tear the certificate across. But she replaced it in its envelope and laid the envelope on the low white melamine table that was close up against the arm of her chair.

  She pressed her knees together and folded her hands in her lap. Her legs were very good, with elongated, slim ankles. To come to the police station she had worn a gray flannel suit with a white blouse. He had a feeling she was a woman who attached importance to being suitably dressed. The suit was changed now for a cotton dress. She was the type who would “save” her clothes, not sit about in a straight skirt or risk a spot on white silk. In her sad, wistful look youth had come back into her face.

  “Mrs. Williams,” he began, “I’m sure you won’t mind telling me how it was you weren’t alarmed when your husband was away for so long.”

  She did mind. She was reluctant. Patience, simply waiting quietly, succeeded with her where pressing the point might not have.

  “Rodney and I …” She paused. It was always “Rodney” with her, Wexford noted, never “Rod.” “We—we quarreled. Well, we had a very serious quarrel. That must have been a few days after Easter. Rodney spent Easter with his mother in Bath. He always spent Christmas and Easter with her. He was an only child, you see, and she’s been in an old people’s home for years and years.”

  Wexford carefully avoided looking at Burden. Wendy said, reminded by her own explanation, “Has she been … I mean, has anyone told her?”

  Enigmatically, Wexford said that had been taken care of. “Go on please, Mrs. Williams.”

  “We quarreled,” she went on. “It was a very private thing we quarreled about. I’ll keep that to myself if you don’t mind. I said to him that—well, I said that if he—if it didn’t stop, if he didn’t promise me faithfully that never—well, I said I’d take Veronica away and he’d never see us again. I—I struck him, I was so angry, so distressed, I can’t tell you—well, he was angry too. He denied it, of course, and then he said I needn’t trouble about leaving him because he’d leave me. He said he couldn’t stand my nagging any more.” She lifted her head and looked Wexford straight in the eye. “I did nag him, I’ll be honest about it. I couldn’t bear it, never seeing him, him always being away. We’d never had a single Christmas together. I always had to go to my parents. We hardly ever had a holiday. I used to beg him …” Her voice faltered and Wexford understood that realization was dawning. She was beginning to see what the real reason was for those absences. “Anyway,” she said, making an effort at control, “he—he calmed down after a while and I suppose I did too. He was going away again and he was due back on the Thursday—the fifteenth, that is. I was still very sore and upset but I said goodbye to him and that I’d see him on Thursday and he said maybe I would and maybe he’d never come back, so you see, I—when he didn’t come back I thought he’d left me.”

  It wasn’t a completely convincing explanation. He tried to put himself in her shoes. He tried to think how he would have felt years ago when he and Dora were young if they’d had a row and she, going away to visit her sister, say, had told him maybe she wouldn’t come back. Probably such a thing had actually happened. It did happen in marriages, even in excellent ones. But if she hadn’t come back on the appointed day, if she’d been a couple of hours late even, he’d have started going out of his mind with worry. Of course, much depended on the seriousness of the quarrel and on the reasons for it.

  “Tell me what happened that Thursday.”

  “In the evening, do you mean?”

  “When he didn’t come.”

  “I was at work. Thursday’s our late night. I didn’t tell you, did I? I’m manageress of the fashion floor at Jickie’s.”

  He was surprised. Somehow he had taken it for granted she didn’t work. “In Myringham?” he asked. “Or the Kingsmarkham branch?”

  “Oh, Kingsmarkham. In the Precinct.”

  Jickie’s was Kingsmarkham’s biggest department store, and the largest area of the Kingsbrook Shopping Precinct was given over to it. Doubtless Rodney Williams had taken care never to accompany Joy when she went shopping there for a jumper or a pair of tights on a Saturday afternoon. Had he risked walking arm in arm down Kingsmarkham High Street during shopping hours? With his son or daughter in the car, had he risked parking in the precinct car park? It was a tightrope he had walked and no doubt, for such is the nature of people like him, he had enjoyed walking it, but he had fallen off at last. Because of the tightrope or for some entirely different reason?

  “We stay open till eight on Thursdays, but I can never get away till nine and it takes me a quarter of an hour to get home. When I did get back Veronica was here but Rodney hadn’t come. I thought there was still a chance he might come but he didn’t and then I knew. Or I thought I knew. I thought he’d left me.”

  “And in all the weeks that followed,” Burden put it, “you weren’t anxious? You didn’t wonder what could happen to you and your daughter if he didn’t come back?”

  “I’d be all right financially without him. I’ve always had to work and now I’m doing quite well.” There was a note of self-esteem in the little soft voice now. Inside the white and pink and fair curls and underneath the lisp and diffidence, Wexford thought there might be a core of steel. “We had a ninety percent mortgage on this house and up till five years ago it was all Rodney could do to keep us. He got promotion then and
things were easier but I kept on working. I needed a life of my own too, he was away so much.”

  “Promotion?” hazarded Wexford, feeling his way.

  “It’s quite a small company and they haven’t been doing too well lately—bathroom fittings and furniture, that sort of thing. Rodney was made sales manager for this locality.”

  Polly Davies picked up the tray and took it away into the kitchen. Wexford thought how easy it was to imagine Rodney Williams—or his idea of Rodney Williams—in his other home but next to impossible to imagine him here. Seated at that glass-topped dining table, for instance, with its bowl of pink and red roses or in one of those pink chintz armchairs. He had been a big, coarse man and everything here had a daintiness like a pink shell or the inside of a rose.

  “I have to know what you quarreled about, Mrs. Williams.”

  Her tone became prissy, very genteel. “It has nothing whatsoever to do with Rodney’s death.”

  “How do you know?”

  She looked at him as if this were unfair persecution.

  “How could it be? He got killed because he picked up someone hitching a lift and they killed him. Something like that … It’s always happening.”

  “That’s an interesting guess but it’s only a guess, isn’t it? You’ve no evidence for it and there’s plenty of evidence against it. The car being returned to Myringham, for instance. A phone call was made to your husband’s employers and a letter of resignation sent to them. Do you think that phone call was made by some homicidal hitchhiker?”

  She sat rigid, keeping her eyes obstinately averted. Polly came back.

  “Are you all right, Mrs. Williams?”

  A nod. An indrawn breath and a sigh.

  “What did you quarrel about?”

  “I could refuse to tell you.”

  “You could. But why take a stand like that when what you tell us will be treated in the strictest confidence? Ask yourself if it’s so awful that we won’t have heard it before. And don’t you think that if you don’t tell us we may come to think it something worse than it really was?”

  She sat silent. She wore an expression like someone who expects at any moment to see something nasty and shocking on television. It was an anticlimax when she said almost in a whisper, “There was another girl.”

  “You mean your husband had a woman friend he’d been seeing?”

  “‘Seeing,’” she said, “I like that expression—‘seeing.’ Yes, he’d been seeing a woman friend. That’s one way of putting it.”

  “How would you put it?”

  “Oh, like that. The way you do. What else does one say? Something crude, I suppose.” The repressive lid suddenly jumped and let out a dribble of resentment, of bitterness. “I thought no one else but me would ever matter to him. I look young, don’t I? I’m pretty enough, I don’t look my age. People say I look eighteen. What was the matter with him that he … ? Yes, we quarreled about that. About a girl. I wanted him to promise me it would never happen again.”

  “He refused?”

  “Oh, he promised. I didn’t believe him. I thought it would start up again when he got the chance. I couldn’t stand it, I didn’t want him if he was going to do that. I was glad when he didn’t come back. Don’t you see? I was glad.”

  “I’ll have to have this girl’s name.

  Quick as a flash: “I don’t know her name.”

  “Come now, Mrs. Williams.”

  “I don’t know it. He wouldn’t tell me. Just a girl. What does it matter?”

  She had said too much already, she was thinking. He could read that, plain in her face, the look in her eyes of being appalled at her own indiscretion. At that moment, before he could say any more, the door opened and a young girl came in. Just before this happened there had been a sound downstairs and footsteps on the stairs—the living room was on the middle floor—but it had all taken place very quickly, within a few seconds. And now, without warning, the girl was here among them.

  What first struck Wexford was that although she was not so tall and her hair was shorter she looked exactly like Sara Williams. They might have been twins.

  10

  HER HAIR WAS THE SAME PALE FUDGE COLOR, not curly but not quite straight either, the tips just touching her shoulders. Brown eyes, ellipse eyebrows, small straight nose, fine white skin sprinkled with freckles, Rodney Williams’s high domed forehead, and his small narrow mouth. But instead of jeans she wore a summer dress with white tights and white sandals. She stood in the doorway looking surprised at the sight of them, a little more than just startled.

  Wendy Williams was taken aback.

  In a flustered way she said, “This is my daughter Veronica,” and to the girl, “You’re home early.”

  “Not much. It’s after nine.”

  The voice was her mother’s, soft and slightly affected, but without the lisp. It was quite unlike Sara’s abrupt, uninflected tones. Recovering poise Wendy said to her, “These are police officers. They’ll only be a few minutes.” She lied fluently, “It’s to do with trouble at the shop. You won’t mind leaving us alone for a bit, will you, darling?”

  “I’m going to have a bath anyway.”

  Closing the door with the sort of precision her mother might use, she went off up the spiral staircase that was the core of this house.

  “I don’t know why she’s so offhand with me lately. This past year …”

  Wexford said, “You haven’t told her?”

  “I haven’t seen her. She always goes to her friend’s straight from school on a Tuesday. Or so she says, she’s so secretive …”

  “Which school, Mrs. Williams?”

  “Haldon Finch Comprehensive. I’ll tell her about her father after you’ve gone. I suppose I shall have to tell her what he was—a bigamist, with another wife somewhere. It won’t be easy. I don’t know if you appreciate that.”

  Wexford, when interrogating, would allow any amount of digression but never total distraction. Those he questioned were obliged to come back to the point sooner or later. It was hard on them, for often they believed they had escaped. The leash had snapped and freedom was surely there for the taking, but the hand always came down and snatched up the broken end.

  “We were talking about this woman friend your husband had. He may have gone to her on the night he died.”

  “I don’t know any more about her!”

  Fear had come into her voice now. It was what many would have called caution or apprehensiveness, but it was really fear.

  “You called her a girl. You implied a young girl.”

  A panicky, jerky, rapid way of speaking—“A young, single girl, very young, that’s all I know. I told you, I don’t know any more!”

  Wexford recalled the overtures Williams had once made to Sylvia. When Sylvia was fifteen. Was it something like that that Wendy had implied when she asked so pathetically if she didn’t still look young? That she at thirty-two to his forty-eight might not be young enough for him?

  “Do you mean she’s young enough to live at home with her parents?”

  A nod, painful and perplexed.

  “What else do you know of her, Mrs. Williams?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know any more. Do you think I wanted him to talk to me about her?”

  That was reasonable enough. At first he thought she was lying when she said she was ignorant of the girl’s name. Now he was less sure. How often had he heard people say, “If my husband (my wife) were unfaithful to me I wouldn’t want to know,” and when they were forced to know, “I don’t want to hear anything about it”? The knives of jealousy are honed on details.

  The question he sensed she would hate but which must be asked he had saved till last.

  “How did you know it was happening at all? How did you know of her existence?”

  He had been wrong. She didn’t mind. She didn’t mind because her answer was a lie that she had been rehearsing in her mind, silently and busily while they talked, waiting for the past half-hour for the
question to come.

  “I had an anonymous letter.”

  Eventually he would get at the truth. It could wait.

  “Now, Mrs. Williams, your daughter …”

  “What about her?” Very quick and defensive.

  “I shall want to talk to Veronica.”

  “Oh no, not that. Please.”

  “When you have told her and she has had a day or two to get over the shock.”

  “But why?”

  “Her father has been murdered. He was due to come here and she was here, alone here. It’s possible he did come and she was the last person to see him alive.”

  “He didn’t come here. She would have told me.”

  “We’ll see, Mrs. Williams. We shall also want to look over this house, particularly at any of your husband’s personal property.”

  “WE KEEP COMING BACK TO THESE YOUNG girls,” Burden said. “And to ravens with women’s faces.”

  “That too. Budd and Wheatley were both attacked by a young girl—not very seriously, either of them, but they were attacked and the assault was with a knife. Rodney Williams liked young girls—I mean, he seems especially to have liked them very young—and he had a very young girlfriend. He died as the result of a knife attack, he was stabbed to death. Now Wheatley says the girl who attacked him was wearing a white tee-shirt with a design on it of a sort of bird with a woman’s head …”

  “And Sara Williams,” said Wexford, “possesses just such a tee-shirt and has a poster with a similar motif on her bedroom wall.”

  “Does she? You’re kidding.”

  “No. It’s true. And Eve Freeborn has a raven with a woman’s head tattooed or drawn on her left wrist, and since the sun came out, Mike, and women aren’t bundling themselves up in cardigans and jackets I’ve seen no less than five girls around Kingsmarkham and Pomfret wearing white tee-shirts with ravens with women’s faces on them. How about that?”

  “God, and I thought we were really getting somewhere. It’s like that bit in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves when the woman says he’ll know the right oil jar because it’ll have a cross on it and when he gets there someone’s put crosses on all the oil jars.”